In high-resolution remote sensing images the gray-scale and texture features，of the ships docking in harbor area，are similar to that of the coast，so it is difficult to automatically detect them.A automatic ship detection method，which is based on a neighborhood self-similarity local salient feature extractor and further space analysis，combined with the utility of prior information，is presented. Experiments show that this method can detect ships in the harbor area accurately and efficiently，and is of high practicability and robustness.